Chino Mayor Eunice Ulloa (left) laughs as she notices city council members Tom Haughey (center) and Gary George (right) also wearing sunglasses during the Chino City Council meeting in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. Ulloa was wearing sunglasses during the meeting due to recent eye surgery. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Management Analyst Jack Morgan places newly elected Chino City Council members Marc Lucio’s name placard in front of his desk prior to being sworn into office in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

New Chino City Council member Mark Hargrove (right) is sworn into office by former Mayor Dennis Yates (left) in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

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New Chino City Council member Marc Lucio is sworn into office by former Mayor Dennis Yates (no pictured) in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

New Chino City Council member Paul Rodriguez (center) is sworn into office by former Mayor Dennis Yates (left) in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

New Chino City Council member Mark Hargrove is sworn into office in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

New Chino City Council member Mark Hargrove (center) is sworn into office by former Mayor Dennis Yates (left) in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

New Chino City Council member Marc Lucio is sworn into office in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Chino Mayor Eunice Ulloa (left) laughs as she notices city council members Tom Haughey (center) and Gary George (right) also wearing sunglasses during the Chino City Council meeting in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. Ulloa was wearing sunglasses during the meeting due to recent eye surgery. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Newly elected Chino City Council member Paul Rodriguez is sworn into office in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

New Chino City Council member Mark Hargrove takes his seat after being sworn into office in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Chino City Manager Matt Ballantyne watches as new Chino City Council members are sworn into office in Chino on Tuesday evening December 18, 2018. (Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG)

Chino’s future is so bright, city officials had to wear shades. Or so it appeared for a minute at Tuesday’s City Council meeting.

Mayor Eunice Ulloa was wearing dark glasses after cataract surgery, apologizing for her appearance but saying that was better than showing off “a huge shiner” from a burst blood vessel. “I’m cool tonight,” she joked of her aloof look.

Then, a few minutes into the meeting, her colleagues quietly and in unison donned matching dark glasses. Not only councilmen Gary George, Paul Rodriguez and Tom Haughey, whose idea it was, but the city manager, the city attorney, the city clerk and other staffers.

Ulloa kept talking, unaware of the joke — after all, she could barely see — until she turned her head and saw everyone looking like the cast of “Reservoir Dogs.”

“Oh my gosh,” Ulloa said, breaking up. “We’re all cool tonight.”

As I was there to see the changing of the guard, the sartorial silliness, and solidarity, was a nice bonus. (The dark glasses were removed in a minute, except for Ulloa’s.) It was enough for me that the council would get two new members, its biggest shakeup since the 1990s.

“I was the last new one elected,” Haughey told me concerning his arrival back in 2001. “No stability in this town, right?”

The results: Rodriguez kept his District 1 seat until 2020, when Duncan’s term would have expired. Mark Hargrove won Elrod’s District 2 position. And George lost his District 3 seat to Marc Lucio.

Hargrove and Lucio are new faces on the dais, the first newcomers elected since Elrod in 1998 who hadn’t first been appointed.

Hargrove is 54 and Lucio 48, also setting them apart from their peers, who are in their 60s or 70s.

“I’ll bring the perspective of someone who has a young family in the community,” Lucio told me. “I’m a working person, commuting like everyone else does in the community.”

He’s a lieutenant with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s aviation division, based in Long Beach. He has six children in a blended family, ranging from age 20 to 3 months.

Speaking of lieutenants, Hargrove retired a year ago at that rank from the Chino men’s prison after 30 years. “I’m a lifelong resident,” Hargrove told me. “My great-grandparents arrived here in 1929. I live on the same property I was born on.”

That property is much smaller, though, shrinking from 20 acres to now being a house at the end of a cul-de-sac. Ah, Chino.

The five-member council now has only two members, Ulloa and Haughey, with any institutional knowledge at City Hall longer than mid-2017.

While I’ve liked them all, fast-growing, family-friendly Chino had a City Council in need of fresh blood and new perspectives. On their free nights, I pictured council members at home writing checks for their Medicare premiums during commercial breaks of “Matlock.”

Hargrove, Lucio and Rodriguez were sworn in by Yates, the retired mayor, who was making his first visit to City Hall since his departure.

“After 24 years, I wasn’t anxious to come back,” Yates confided. I noted that he’d lost weight. That’s from no longer having civic obligations. He cracked: “I got off the banquet circuit.”

George said council service was fun while it lasted. He called the body “one of the most respected councils in the Inland Empire.” (It may help that so many others set the bar low.) Elrod had already made farewell remarks at the last meeting and wasn’t present.

During a break, I asked Rodriguez how he felt having been validated via election. “There’s two ways to run: unopposed or scared,” he said with a smile. “I feel better now.”

We’ll see what direction the new council takes. Larry Walker said his slow-growth Protect Chino group backed Hargrove and Lucio. “We’re happy about the outcome and we’re optimistic about the council. It continues to move in the right direction,” Walker told me.

Ulloa, a slow-growther often in the council minority, said she expects harmony. “The new members coming on, they must love the community as much as we do,” she told me. “It’s just accepting the new people into the family.”

The meeting itself was low-key, as befits the week before Christmas. Ulloa posed for ceremonial photos with winners of Christmas parade contests and the home beautification award. Years from now, family members will examine the photos and wonder why the mayor is in sunglasses.

Actually, up on the dais she looked kind of punk rock. If someone had slipped an electric organ in front of her, she could have favored us with “96 Tears.”

In what may have been my favorite moment of the evening, a student at the lectern introduced himself and a classmate as coming from Ayala High on a government class assignment.

The adults act like adults too. At the meeting’s end, Ulloa told the audience there may be 3-2 and 4-1 votes in the future, but that’s just democracy. “We have a tradition in our community: We can disagree, but we’re not disagreeable,” she said.

David Allen is in the dark Friday, Sunday and Wednesday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, visit insidesocal.com/davidallen, like davidallencolumnist on Facebook and follow @davidallen909 on Twitter.

Since 1997, David Allen has been taking up valuable newsprint and pixels at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, where he is a columnist and blogger (insidesocal.com/davidallen). Among his specialties: city council meetings, arts and culture, people, places, local history, dining and a log in a field that resembled the Loch Ness monster. The Illinois native has spent his newspaper career in California, starting in 1987 at the Santa Rosa News-Herald and continuing at the Rohnert Park-Cotati Clarion, Petaluma Argus-Courier and Victor Valley Daily Press. A resident of Claremont who roots for the St. Louis Cardinals and knows far too much about Marvel Comics, the Kinks and Frank Zappa's Inland Valley years, he is the author of two collections of columns: 'Pomona A to Z' and 'Getting Started.'